“If you’re the parent of a student,don’t you want them to study in a jurisdiction that’s safe and your child is less likely to catch a potentially deadly virus?”
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PR and marketing guru Dianne Bortoletto said the campaign could be a difficult sell,given WA’s tough stance on quarantine and tendency to make snap decisions on interstate borders,causing people to get caught up in quarantine or be locked out.
“The challenges that the state has at the moment is it’s built a reputation for itself for shutting the borders at an instant’s notice,so building traveller’s confidence up knowing they can come to Western Australia and get home or be on their way to WA and be able to get in with confidence,I think that’s going to be a challenge,” she said.
“I think there will be two types of people wanting to come to WA;there will be those needing to visit family and friends that have been separated from them for a really long time,and there will be those looking for somewhere safe to go,and Mark McGowan has said a million times,WA has been the envy of the world and that may attract a certain traveller.”
Property Council WA executive director Sandra Brewer said recent research by its organisation had shown 10 per cent of 800 Victorian and New South Wales residents it surveyed were very or extremely likely to consider moving to the state after borders opened.
“The one thing needed to accommodate a growing population is housing supply. But,housing delivery can’t happen instantaneously. We need a workforce to deliver it,investors to support it,and an efficient planning system to grow sustainably,” she said.
“The availability of skills and labour has been a critical concern for the property industry for most of 2021,with a lack of workers causing significant price escalations.
“The problem has become more acute in the past two to three months,and increasingly we are hearing cases of projects being at risk or placed on hold.”
Since the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March 2020,WA has had few community cases and 12 days of lockdown following the initial restrictions at the start of the pandemic.
It has imposed 14 days mandatory hotel quarantine for anyone arriving from overseas,while interstate borders prevented the virus from seeding locally.
Before the pandemic,WA had more than 50,000 international students from 147 countries injecting $2.1 billion into the economy. The sector also supported 12,000 jobs.
In 2019,nearly one million international travellers visited the state,a number which was reduced to a trickle in 2021.
As of December 1,87 per cent of the eligible WA population had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.